Posted
by
kdawson
on Friday July 31, 2009 @08:29AM
from the sound-of-a-crumbling-business-model dept.

rrohbeck writes "Today Amazon credited my card with $65.45. After ordering an Eee PC 1005 HA from amazon.com, I asked them for a refund for the cost of Windows XP via the 'Contact us' form. At first they told me to cancel any items on my order that I wanted a refund for, but after I explained that XP was pre-installed on the machine they got it. They asked what the cost of the OS was, and I answered that I had no idea but that Amazon UK refunded £40.00. Within a few hours I got a response saying 'I've requested a refund of $65.45 to your Visa card.' Somehow I doubt that Amazon will charge Asus or even Microsoft, but maybe they will one day if more people do this. Oh, and peeling off the 'Designed for Microsoft Windows XP' sticker is easy, too."

4 months ago, my Maxtor hard drive died after about a year of use. Sometimes these things happen.

I requested a RMA, and sent the drive off, and didn't hear anything for a few weeks. Eventually, I began to get suspicious, and contacted support, who told me (after a delay of several days) that they'd received the drive, but somehow lost it. I informed them that I would be moving in a few days, and to send the repaired drive to my new address, given the egregious delay.

Absolutely agreed on NewEgg. I've dropped probably close to 10 grand over the last 6 or 7 years and have never ever had a problem with them. The 2 times I've had to RMA things, the turnaround time from my ship date to them / new item back to me has been under a week. Items returned have had costs promptly refunded and the couple of times I've had to use their customer support, things have gone smoothly. I simply won't buy from any other site or local shop unless its something I need yesterday. Most of the t

I don't think that it's actually Newegg that makes the credit decisions. I'm pretty sure that the credit is actually supplied by another provider, and that Newegg probably just gets a kickback on the deal.

But can you get a replacement "super" key for a Dell Inspiron 1420 with the Ubuntu logo rather than the Windows logo? Buying a Dellbuntu is nice, and they don't put any Windows stickers on it, but that damn key is still there...

I just bought a 1005HA for my wife. It has a built in "return to default" feature that restores the original XP image by pressing Fn+F9 a bunch of times. This is because there's no optical drive on the machine. I assume the feature uses a hidden HDD partition to hold the image. Unless you wipe this hidden partition, you're keeping the XP image for no cost. Seems of dubious moral ground to me.

My Acer Aspire One (Linux version, since it is easily available in the UK) came with the customised version of Linux on the recovery partition (it lasted about two days before I installed Kuki Linux -- a customisation of Ubuntu -- from a USB stick and wiped the whole drive).

Maybe, maybe not. Amazon may have enough buying power to extract a refund from ASUS. But that could backfire on them... or it could work in their favour.
A lot depends on how many more people ask Amazon for a refund for an unwanted Windows license!!

Why would I want yet another XP license? Sell it? I'd rather tell people to install Ubuntu; they'll be grateful in the end. Especially XP Home with the latest WGA - I have several old XP Pro licenses from laptops that I converted. Anybody who has been around for a while must have XP licenses coming out their ears.I'd be happy if Amazon set up a process where you have to return the license sticker for the refund.

If the word gets out that you can take off $65 of the laptop price by calling Amazon and asking for a refund without anyone actually checking that you are not using your Windows license, more people will start doing exactly that. That is when Amazon will come up with a better process for handling Windows refunds.

Instead of a ~$65 refund, I bet you could peel the sticker off and sell the COA to someone for $100. MS may not like it, but it'll activate on another computer and won't ever fail WGA. You end up with an extra $35 in your pocket, and your friend will have slightly cheaper oem COA. This is especially handy because one cannot buy XP retail anymore.

For quite some time now, all major OEMs have been printing "dummy keys" to the COAs. The official method of recovery (a recovery CD or a recovery partition) never asks for the key as the OS is pre-activated. This official recovery method obviously won't install to anything other than the hardware it was shipped with. Usually it is tied to a specific custom BIOS. If you try to install a standard OEM disc with the key found on the COA, you'll find that the installer won't reject it outright (it will allow you to complete the installation) but when you try to activate, it will instruct you to contact Microsoft by phone.

I haven't had experiences with laptops but in cases of desktops you can get MS to issue you a new working key by stating that the PC was repaired and this required a motherboard replacement (hence, you had to use a replacement media and this issue came up). For laptops, not sure what would make MS give you a new key - the license is tied to the piece of hardware it was sold with. You are most likely out of luck and have to contact the manufacturer of the hardware. You could try to bluff the droid on the phone by stating the same thing (motherboard was replaced due to fault) and assume that the key doesn't tell if it was bundled with a laptop.

Before MS and OEMs started doing this, people just wrote down keys off publicly accessible computers and used those to activate standard OEM disc installations. I never quite got the original idea why it was smart to print the valuable product key on a sticker where anyone could snap a picture or write it down, but this was MS we're talking about...

Manual activations work fine over the phone in this situation. I've done hundreds of them. You used to have to speak to an MS rep sometimes but in the last 12 months I don't think I've had to. All done through the automated system.

As well as XP X64 [newegg.com], which is quite nice and lets me use the 5Gb of RAM(4 for the CPU, 1 for the GPU) that I have. Despite the horror stories I heard everywhere thanks to WOW64 [wikipedia.org] it has run every program I have thrown at it, even my 90s games.

Yeah - but not only does MS "not like it"... They actively spend money on lawyers to harass and threaten anyone they catch attempting to do it (despite "right of first sale" law seeming to be on the side of the consumer on this one).

I tried selling unopened OEM copies of Windows 2000 Professional, years back, with original COA certificates still shrink-wrapped with the media - and the Microsoft legal team got my eBay auctions canceled promptly, and sent me legal threats in email.

Note true. Not only are retail versions of XP SP2 still available [newegg.com], it's very [ewiz.com] trivial [ewiz.com] to find legal OEM licenses of Windows XP Pro SP3 available for purchase. I know, I recently bought two OEM licenses of Windows XP in Spanish; they were out of stock so I had to wait a couple of months until Microsoft printed up some more.

...at least according to this article [sitepoint.com]. The author makes a convincing argument that MS took a bath with that price in order to keep Linux from gaining a toe-hold in the netbook/notebook market, and also credits the threat of Linux Netbook Popularity with the extension of XP to 2010 and modifications of specs on Windows 7. A good read.

Could it really only be $15? I would like to purchase a copy of XP for running in VMWare, but just going out and buying a copy is over $100. It's too much, considering I can get a whole PC with Windows preinstalled for under $300. (Maybe XP Pro isn't the cheapest version, but don't the cheaper versions lack some basic things like Remote Desktop?)

It can, provided your PC meets certain specifications. Windows XP for Ultra Low-Cost-PC (yes, that's it's name!) can be had for about $15 for OEMs. It's just XP Hom

Why is that the question? They give OEM's a discount, to prevent them from thinking along the lines of - hey, no bulk discount for an easily copied software so I'll just under-report how many I'm selling.

The answer is No, they won't sell it to an individual for that cost. And as long as people see it as better than the previous offering (which is almost guaranteed, until they make a rock-solid OS to begin with), the next version will always cost more than (previous version + adjustment for inflation).

But the real question is, can you call 'em up today and order a XP license for the same $65?

Not an MS fan by a long stretch, but still: why would you expect to get a full retail price refund on a bundled item? If that were generally possible, you could make a living by buying composite items and getting refunds for their individual parts, the sum exceeding the original purchase price.

First off, if 10 people do this, Amazon is going to find out what it really costs, and it isn't $65 or anything close to that.

Secondly, they are't going to do this without some kind of verification. It sounds like someone asked for money and they gave it to them. Great customer service but hardly something they can operate a business on. So unless there is a verifiable way to determine that XP has been irrevocably uninstalled I don't see this happening too much more.

Yes, but there's problems with it. In my experience you can't get the same exact specs with linux for cheaper than the MS counterpart. Sometimes they're the exact same, and sometimes they will toss in a slightly larger hard drive or something in the linux version. Also, since apparently no one really wanted linux the linux versions are getting harder and harder to find in a netbook. You can't get them at Best Buy anymore for sure.

In the case of the Eee 900A I bought from Best Buy, it looked as if it were designed to make sure no one really wanted Linux on it, as it was set up with a 4 GB SSD and Xandros Linux with UnionFS, so that as soon as it got an Internet connection it downloaded enough updates to fill the SSD and make it unusable.

I knew enough to wipe Xandros and install Ubuntu Eee (later Easy Peasy)--but Joe Average would stomp back to Best Buy in a snit and ask for his money back or trade up to a different {net, note}book, a

First off, if 10 people do this, Amazon is going to find out what it really costs, and it isn't $65 or anything close to that.

Secondly, they are't going to do this without some kind of verification.... So unless there is a verifiable way to determine that XP has been irrevocably uninstalled I don't see this happening too much more.

Arlo Guthrie said something relevant on the matter:

And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation,

or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are,

just walk in say "Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.". And walk out.

You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't t

What's interesting is I recently picked up a Dell mini (10v) with Ubuntu pre-installed, and the price was the exact same as the one that came with XP pre-installed.
In retrospect I probably should have just gotten the XP version, in case I ever need XP, since I put a fresh copy of Ubuntu on it anyway, that doesn't have all the Dell bundled nonsense.

What's interesting is I recently picked up a Dell mini (10v) with Ubuntu pre-installed, and the price was the exact same as the one that came with XP pre-installed.

I just read somewhere that the average cost of a single customer support call to Dell and likes is higher than what they pay MS for OEM Windows. And when selling Linux to 'the masses', more people call support (why doesn't app/game/gadget work, etc). This is one of the main reasons why many vendors selling Linux netbooks stopped and switched to XP after high return and support rates, not some vast conspiracy, but economics.

Bah, then they should charge more for the Linux support. Simple. I would never call it, but I sure wouldn't mind if their prices were a bit higher to cover the unavoidable cost of supporting another OS. Or not offer software support at all, whatever.

The reason people smell conspiracy is the sudden drop of all Linux, anywhere, as soon as Microsoft reacted to the growing Linux use. They didn't take the netbook market seriously at first, but then overnight you couldn't buy a Linux netbook at a brick and mortar store if you wanted to. That's the conspiracy.

You can't tell me it's economics. There are plenty of ways they could have made money hands over fist. Instead, they let Microsoft kill the whole category.

Come on now, this is Slashdot.... where posts about "I haven't paid for Windows ever even tho it's on 12 of my b0xen" normally gets modded up.

If this is true that a simple phone call can get a few fins back in some users wallet and the key still works you know it's going to be taken advantage of. "The rest of us" isn't as big of a number as you might think it is.

> Did you ever try to get a refund on those copies of Windows you didn't want or use?> Did you try to sell them? Or are you just complaining?

Way to miss the point of this whole topic dude. [Whoosh!]

The whole point is somebody actually found a way to get the money back on a product they didn't want but were forced to buy anyway. And no you can't sell them. The sticker isn't physically removable without destroying it and it isn't legal (at least it isn't EULA legal, certainly it is morally right and

Charging a customer because they have an OS installed on a computer / notebook is completely wrong. Lately I've been trying to pick up a notebook for school and I've been getting a run around. I've called Dell, Asus and shopped at the all the major Ontario computers stores, all of them come back with the same answer, you need to buy an OS with the notebook. It doesn't matter if I don't want Windows because I don't get a choice, personally I think forcing a customer to buy an OS is horrible idea.

As a Linux user I don't understand why I'd pay someone to hit next 4 times and partitioning a drive which a 5 year old could do. Even when I talked to Dell they only offered to install the "Big" Linux names.

If I'm going to buy a notebook then I want to make sure it comes unbundled and with a clean HDD so I can put what I need onto it. The problem is I can't seem to get any one to send me a blank notebook that I can install a proper OS to, if I spend the 100 dollar software package bundle then I'll wipe the notebook when I get it wasting the 100 dollars, but when I tell the computer store / company I'm going to wipe it so don't sell me the bundle they tell me they can't.

These stores will start to get the message when they find that enough people are willing to waste their time as they try to waste our time. Their vulnerability is they pay their staff usually by the hour and they pay rent.

We need to just keep refusing to pay for what we don't want in their bundles. The more time we waste the more the message gets through. Short answer: We don't want your garbage. Where do I recycle?

It doesn't matter if I don't want Windows because I don't get a choice, personally I think forcing a customer to buy an OS is horrible idea....Does anyone else have this problem?

i buy and sell laptops w/o an o/s, if that's what the customer wants. i would guess the biggest problem for an oem like dell is, when you sell a laptop w/ no o/s, you still have to take the step of actually installing something to verify all the hardware works properly. then there's more work involved in swapping the hd w/ an empt

> As a Linux user I don't understand why I'd pay someone to hit next 4 times and partitioning a drive which a 5 year> old could do. Even when I talked to Dell they only offered to install the "Big" Linux names.

Just try it kid. I double dog dare you. The preloads ARE worth it. Just bought three HP Minis and looked at just wiping their over customized Linux off and putting Ubuntu Netbook Remix on. No fracking way, the wired port didn't work, two battery applets would appear at random, the internal s

Amazon is just the retailer, but as long as the OEM is still cashing in from the license sale, it's no real progress. It doesn't make a difference if the retailer is giving you the refund, the money is still going to the OEM and as a result, Microsoft. And as long as this happens, they'll still enter corrupt bargaining deals and shut out Linux from mainstream offerings. We need OEMs to give the refund, not the retailer.

So maybe eventually, Amazon will ask the OEMs for a refund for the license. What will the OEMs say? Probably no. Then what will happen? Amazon will probably start refusing the refund as well too. Back at square one, going back to buy my computers from system76, itwasfunwhileitlasted, etc.

In any case, if I were Microsoft, I'd change the wording of the EULA to something like "By purchasing this computer, you consent to pay for all software preinstalled, whatever" to bar these refunds. I don't think it's unenforceable.

It's good to get the refund, but IMO FOSS types should boycott ASUS. I own an EEE-701, which was the original category-killer. Linux propelled netbooks to fame, and then ASUS weasled out with their "itsbetterwithwindows" campaign.

There are plenty of companies willing to sell netbooks with Linux pre-loaded (Acer makes a very nice model) and we should patronize them.

Just one small point - this doesn't apply just to we Linux FOSS users but also to people like my missus who bought herself a EEE PC 1000HE to replace her aging laptop that went faulty.

She doesn't use Linux, is happy with XP and has a licensed copy of Windows XP Professional (not OEM-ed to a specific PC). I did tell her to try for the refund for the license on the new Asus because she could just use her existing XP Pro one - but she said she couldn't be bothered with reinstallation of everything.

Dear x,
Thank you for your response.
I have been speaking to the Product Managers for the Software and Laptops and they have both advised that we would not issue a refund on the OS.
You may return the product for a refund if you are within the time period of 28days after purchase but other then that we are not going to be issuing a refund on the OS.
The Product Manager for the laptops has been speaking to the manufacture and they have come back with the below response regarding the matter:
'It's a load of rubbish, I don't know where this rumor has come from J we started getting people asking for it on the EEE PC when we first produced the XP versions.
We get the odd person phoning up saying this to us but no one gives the cost of XP back and I can understand why they think we would.
I'm sorry we cannot help -- I have never heard of any manufacture or reseller giving the money back.'
Kind Regards,
y
Ebuyer Customer Support Team

isn't it remarkable that they started getting these requests when they did the XP eeePC! What an uncanny co-incidence.

Not that I don't appreciate that Amazon will let customers sell them back the Microsoft Windows software, but I'm sort of wondering why. (Here comes the car analogy.) If I buy a Subaru WRX with a normal shifter but plan on putting in a short-throw shifter after-market, Subaru isn't going to buy back my normal shifter. They sell me what they have on the lot. In terms of Amazon, I'm buying what they're offering: a laptop running Windows. If I want a laptop running a different OS, I'd buy it somewhere else. If there are no vendors selling that laptop without Windows, then I eat the cost, or try to recoup my costs by reselling the license (which I don't think is transferable but in this case one could probably make an exception).

Could be I'm completely off the mark here - if so, I hope that someone straightens me out without using the word moron more than fifteen times in the reply. When you order a computer without any operating system at all, you're really asking for an addition step during the assembly, not fewer steps, right? What I mean is, the computer is assembled, and then an operating system is installed, and some type of software is run on the machine to test the hardware, maybe perform a burn in period, that kind of th

thing, this microsoft windows push. it now comes on virtually all computers regardless of whether you want it, with paths offered only to upgrade the windows to a more premium version (not remove the bloody thing.) Special deals on windows are offered at retailers like newegg if you're building a computer, in fact the os is even pushed as a purchasing option before you finish adding products to your cart. its bundled with some motherboards you buy as well. windows now comes standard on virtually any EEE

A number of people have pointed out that a few refunds for XP is not a sign that anything is changing. I believe these refunds only show that Amazon has not formed any kind of official policy for this situation. They are simply erring on the side of not pissing people off, because technical people are going to buy more computer products, either from Amazon or someone else who treats them better. I'm sure they are aware of the press.

Sometime soon, I think we will see a more permanent resolution to this customer service issue. I can't say whether it will be progress or not.

Oh, and peeling off the 'Designed for Microsoft Windows XP' sticker is easy, too."

But how does one remove or replace the crash key^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Windows logo key from the keyboard? This is a laptop so it isn't as easy as switching a keyboard.

It has always bothered me that keyboard hardware manufacturers brand their hardware with Microsoft's logo when a simple keyboard really should remain OS neutral. I'm sure they are getting paid by MS for this.

- posted using a nice old AT style keyboard from before the Windows key insanity began.

I could not quite understand what you are trying to say. If your point is that rrohbeck should have sucked it up and not asked for a refund, then, sorry, it is you who is the moron. Why should someone pay for something they do not want if there is an option to get their money back?

To give you the obligatory car analogy: Imagine $carmanifacturer bundles a TomTom nav with any car sale by default. You do not want the TomTom, either because you already have one or because you can get a different nav somewhere e

Except you can remove the TomTom from the car and sell it aftermarket. The last time I checked an OEM EULA wording (admittedly some time ago) the license was tied to the hardware, so you could not transfer it separately from the hardware.

Because there is a BIG difference between not having an Operating System and not being tied to a network? I'd love to see how well YOU would fare if they just handed you a cell phone with no OS and a "good luck buddy!" because that is just about as hard as Joe Average would find installing a new OS on a blank PC.

And please don't say "Linux live CDs make it easy!" because that is as much bullshit as MSFT with their "get the facts" crap. Sure, if you research your living ass off and check on every single component of that brand new PC and get lucky that they haven't changed something between rev-1 and rev-2 then it'll work without a hitch, maybe. More likely there is gonna be at least one major PITA piece of hardware that won't have a driver at all, or has a driver that you have to jump through CLI and never will get to work 100% (thanks Broadcom!) or some other royal PITA.

That is why I still sell Windows machines even though I could make more profit with Linux. The odds that my customers will find anything on sale at Walmart, Best Buy, Staples without XP support? About 0%. The odds that they will find something that doesn't work in Linux at the above stores? About 80%, sometimes higher. Installing an OS can be a royal PITA. It is even worse if there isn't a driver for a piece of hardware. The guy who wrote TFA is lucky that ASUS EEEs are well documented and have Linux drivers right there on site. I bet the odds wouldn't be nearly as good if he picked up some Compaq at Walmart. Most Windows users have trouble finding anything in Control Panel. CLI? BWA HA HA HA HA! They'd have a better chance of solving cold fusion than getting anything they do in CLI to work.